In recent years, network deployment based on High Altitude Platforms (HAPs) has gained momentum through several initiatives where air vehicles and telecommunications payloads have been adapted and refined, resulting in more efficient and less expensive platforms. In this paper, the authors study HAP as an alternative or complementary fast-evolving technology to provide mobile services in rural areas of emerging countries, where business models need to be carefully tailored to the reality of their related markets. In these large areas with low user density, mobile services uptake is likely to be slowed by a service profitability which is in turn limited by a relatively low average revenue per user.